Cop shoots and kills little girl's pony

An Oregon family is demanding answers after a Sheriff's deputy shot and killed their pony. The family says they had no idea the officer was going to shoot the family pet, and it all happened without their knowing and for no good reason whatsoever.

Crista Fitzgerald of Clackamas County explained that the 30-year-old American Miniature Horse, named Gir, had no problems aside from being old. But when he escaped from his stall in a Molalla barn overnight on February 18th, an officer shot and killed him.

"I locked his stall door, and I always do a double check. The next morning I came back out before I had class in the morning, which is around 10, and he was gone," Crista explained.

She said that Gir didn't get very far from the barn before being shot.

"We started knocking door-to-door. And the first house we came to he was laying in their yard," she recounted.

At first the family thought that Gir was taking a nap. But as they got closer to him, they saw that he had been shot multiple times.

"We walked up closer and I bent down to pet him, and that's when I saw the pool of blood behind his cheek bones. The neighbor came out and told us she had called the sheriff's department and they put him down," Fitzgerald told local reporters.

"When I called the officer he said that he had gotten out on the highway and gotten hit by a car and broke both of his back legs," she added.

A spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff Office, Sgt. Nathan Thompson told local KATU News that the officer claimed that the horse "had broken legs."

Sgt. Thompson also lied and claimed that the deputy called the Oregon Humane Society to ask about euthanizing the horse and they told him to just go ahead and shot it. But a spokeswoman for OHS said that this is not true; they never received a call from anyone at the Sheriff's Department about the horse, and they would not have given them this advice if they had.

Fitzgerald said she didn't believe the department's story that Gir had broken legs. She claims that there was no sign of anything wrong with the horse's legs when she saw her dead family pet.

"My vet said there was absolutely nothing wrong with him," she added.

The body of the horse was sent to Oregon State University's veterinary lab for an autopsy. They confirmed that there were no broken bones whatsoever in the horses legs, only in the jaw, which was shattered by one of the bullets from the deputy's weapon.

"If I had gone out and shot the pony I'd be in jail right now. That's cruel," Fitzgerald said.

"He was part of our family... There's no way to replace him," she said, saying that her children don't understand where Gir went, or why a police officer would hurt him.

Watch the local report below...